Semicolons, serial commas, and other persnickety punctuation, part 1

It’s only fair that I share this with you, my prospective client. I like semicolons. I like serial commas. If there’s a place to use a semicolon, I will gladly use it. The same goes with serial commas. I’ll talk about persnickety punctuation—or, rather, punctuation that I tend to have strong feelings about—in several blog posts.

Semicolons join two complete sentences that are closely related.

I don’t like peanut butter; it sticks to the roof of my mouth.

Those two phrases could stand on their own. I don’t like peanut butter. It sticks to the roof of my mouth. Joining them makes for smoother reading. This format also clarifies what “it” refers to in the second phrase.

This example phrase could be rewritten by removing the semicolon and inserting “because” in its place. I don’t like peanut butter because it sticks to the roof of my mouth.

If you prefer to avoid using semicolons in similar situations, we can certainly work with that during copyediting.

But…

It gets difficult when you have compound lists.

“What the heck is a compound list?”

I’m glad you asked.

I’d like you to meet my mom, my dad, my sister, Shannon, and Peter.

How many people would I like you to meet?

On the face of it, the list appears to include five people: a mother, a father, a sister, Shannon, and Peter. Semicolons would make things more clear, as they can act as stronger commas. I’d like you to meet my mom; my dad; my sister, Shannon; and Peter. Thanks to the semicolons, we now know that “sister” describes my relationship with Shannon. They are the same person.

“But romance doesn’t use semicolons.”

I can work with that. (Did you expect me to say something else?)

We can rearrange the sentence to eliminate the semicolons. I’d like you to meet my mom, my dad, Peter, and my sister, Shannon. Now it’s obvious that Shannon and my sister are the same people. Peter could also be my dad, though, so let’s fix that too. I’d like you to meet Mom, Dad, Peter, and my sister, Shannon. We still don’t know who Peter is, but that’s not the fault of the punctuation!

*Note: We kept the comma after “my sister” because I have only one sister. The sentence would have the same message if I removed Shannon’s name. You’d still be meeting my sister. But if I have more than one sister, I am specifying that I want you to meet Shannon, not Susan or Taylor or Tanisha.